Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A text that Caroline Sinders sent her mother after discovering that a SXSW panel she organized had been threatened. (Courtesy of Sinders) SXSW Interactive, one of the country’s largest technology conferences, abruptly canceled two panels linked to Gamergate last night after receiving what it termed “numerous threats of on-site violence.” One panel, titled “Level Up”…
IBM is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices, according to a regulatory filing. Shares dropped in the wake of the disclosure. The investigation looks at how IBM is accounting for some of its transactions in the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland, which could have an impact on its stated revenue. The company said…
ISIS supporters are urging their fellow extremists to “follow trending hashtags” and “monitor the media for lies” in an extensive, new propaganda manual that provides a rare inside look into the terrorist organization’s social media strategy, Vocativ has learned. While ISIS has been skilled at using social media and forums to distribute their propaganda, the…
In March 2000, the financial weekly Barron’s published an infamous study under the headline “Burning Up.” It focused on scores of unprofitable Internet companies, specifically analyzing their “burn rates”—their pace of cash consumption until there’s nothing left–and presciently predicted the ugly result when capital raising turned difficult. The screen turned up then-prominent and now-forgotten gems,…
Investors valued the medical testing startup Theranos at $9 billion last year. But a bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation published last week has thrown the company into crisis by raising questions about whether its technology works as advertised. Theranos was founded by a Stanford dropout and is based in Silicon Valley, so people have naturally drawn comparisons to tech…
Earlier today, one of our writers wrote a thoughtful piece about how Google was helping refugees navigate the bureaucratic chaos that has become the Greek islands. Every country has a different application process for asylum seekers, and the vast majority are horribly understaffed and underfunded. Upon fighting their way thousands of miles across land and…
Tesla’s new autopilot features, which offer a basic autonomous driving feature that can change lanes, follow other cars and react to trouble, rolled out to drivers this week. The features are cool, but Tesla stressed when it was released that the “driver is still responsible for, and ultimately in control of, the car.” Autopilot is…
With this first post, I am launching an experimental new online digest called Today in #BlackTwitter. The morning report will briefly recap the most talked about news stories, hashtags and issues among the loose network of users collectively known as “Black Twitter”. TIBT aims to encapsulate the discourse on the social media platform that occurred…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Popular cloud hosting service DigitalOcean just added a very interesting feature today — floating IPs. So you may ask what is that and why do I need that? It’s better than sliced bread, and let me tell you why. Many developers are using these trendy cloud hosting services, such as DigitalOcean,…
YouTube is peeling back the curtain on a paid version of the video site that doesn’t have any ads. The site, owned by Google, introduced the new $9.99 a month subscription option Wednesday. Called Red, it’ll launch in the United States on October 28 with a one-month free trial. For the first time in YouTube’s…